Rifle season, p.1
Rifle Season, page 1
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Dedicated to Laverne Kelly, teacher, mother and shining example
PROLOGUE
They were concealed in a pocket of aspen, frigid wind sheering off a blizzard of gold and scattering their scent. The client was prone, eyes behind the scope, trying to slow his pounding heart, but the altitude and his girth made that difficult. Mace was crouched beside him, lean as a Spartan, Leica 10×42 binos pinned on the behemoth munching wheatgrass across the canyon.
Both men were in camo under dayglow-orange vests and caps. The shot itself was through a gap in timber and understory, cake for the customized Winchester M70 with the right operator but still a keyhole at 350 yards. The elk’s atypical rack was flat massive.
Mace counted nine antler points on the left beam and twelve on the right. The headgear resembled an immense brown spider lying on its back. He put the gross score at a rarified 450.
“Boone and Crockett, here we come,” said the giddy shooter, a balding directional driller from Tulsa named Hodges who had paid dearly to be lying in that dirt.
“Keep that safety on and lower your damn voice,” whispered Mace with an edge that didn’t suffer hubris. His shaggy black hair and runaway Fu Manchu were lifted from an Allman Brothers cover but the spot-on resemblance to a frontier gunslinger was due entirely to his eyes. They were dark and narrow and wouldn’t look misplaced in the sockets of a raptor. He was six feet even and thirty-three years old. His religion was attention to detail and he was bothered by a patch of foliage beyond the animal because it didn’t move enough with the breeze.
Probably a trick of scudding clouds and sun but his gut wouldn’t let the aberration go. Best be certain before that round exited the barrel at 2,950 feet per second and plowed through anything living or dead until inert. He glassed downrange one more time with excruciating care. No innocent critters were visible, nor any of the five hundred square inches of gaudy fluorescence required by Colorado on the outer garment of rifle hunters. Nothing but every shooter’s wet dream there for the taking.
Mace glanced at his meal ticket, suddenly irked by the man’s sloth compared to the chiseled creation they were about to execute. Odd. The cut of his clients had never bothered him so intensely. But a week of scouting this epic specimen so Hodges could emerge from his bourbon and rib-eye stocked tent to pull the trigger had grated on him. The unearned part, no different than driving a pack-a-day slob to the finish line of a marathon.
It wasn’t just that, of course. It was a larger, ineluctable truth that simmered beneath the façade of his occupation. An occupation that paid a shitload of bills and kept his butt on a comfy pedestal in big-game circles. Bottom line, he was in demand because he delivered trophies rain or shine.
Mace smothered the rising buzz of his misgivings, put the Sig Sauer rangefinder on target and double-checked the distance. “Get ready,” he said.
Hodges settled his jowl into the stock and slid the safety off. On cue, the bull stopped grazing and raised its head, senses strummed. Mace could feel the shot unraveling. All that fat-boy babysitting and one more trophy in the books with his name listed as guide about to evaporate.
Then the wind quit and the ballistic vagaries of air pressure and humidity aligned with a destiny neither man could conjure in their darkest imagination. “Send it,” said Mace.
No sooner had the words cleared the roof of his mouth than Hodges fired and Mace saw the camo-clad apparition with a compound bow at full draw and roared like he was stabbed. The bull was already galvanized, leaping away from this specter when the .225-gram short-mag shattered the right side of its rack. The kinetic wallop briefly put the animal down before it lurched up and bolted away. Then the gunshot faded into silence and the flutter of dead leaves reconvened.
“Fuck you yelling about?” asked Hodges, clueless and squinting. “I hit him, didn’t I?”
Mace jumped to his feet with a tremendous ringing in his ears despite impulse plugs in both to minimize the muzzle blast. He whipped the glasses up and scoured the area where the bull was standing but the bowhunter had vanished.
“Hey,” said Hodges, cycling the bolt and cranking his head around. “I asked you a question.”
Mace saw his mouth moving but couldn’t hear him. Couldn’t hear anything but his own adrenaline-cut blood thundering through his skull. He snagged his pack off the ground because it had a basic trauma kit and took the fall line, crashing down through Gambel oak and slewing over slabs of granite. He splashed across a creek and sprinted up the other side of the drainage, struck by the throbbing clarity of everything before him.
He could have spotted a needle in a stadium but nearly tripped over the man sprawled face-down on his weapon with its cams and carbon-fiber arrow still nocked in the polyethylene string. Not that the guy would have cared. The slug had tumbled after hitting the antler, entering his chest and departing his back in a ruby blast that glazed the larkspur he was lying on.
Mace dug a pack of QuikClot from his ruck, ripped it open and stuffed the gauze into the exit wound, seeking the arterial breach. Blood soaked through instantly. He tore open another pack, stuffed that in the hole and applied pressure with both hands reminding himself there was no cell service so not to waste the motion. The body settled under his palms as if he were forcing it back into the earth.
Then Hodges blundered into the clearing and saw what he’d shot. His knees went funky and he dropped his rifle and staggered sideways with the heels of his hands mashed into his sockets.
Mace didn’t notice. He was too busy staring at the bowhunter’s half-turned face under the mossy-oak buff. He was young, mid-twenties at most. Only his brown eyes were visible. They were wide open and angled up to his left, as if there were something amazing lurking in the clouds.
ONE
A year had come and gone since Mace ignored his vaunted gut and demolished his life from the foundation up. It was early on a Monday morning and he was bagging trash on the shoulder of Highway 62 west of Ridgway sporting a yellow safety vest and a noticeable weave to his step. Off to the south, an October storm had left the summit of Mount Sneffels laser-white and hanging in a cobalt sky that beggared description but he was immune to the spectacle. Just kept snagging litter with his county-supplied grabber stick and working on a pint of Tito’s with a nifty sleight of hand.
His beard had gone biblical and his chore jacket couldn’t hide the belly he’d tacked on over the previous winter. His eyes had dulled along with his figure. They no longer cut glass, which didn’t matter because he was done getting people in killing range of wary animals for a living. This diminishment, combined with a maintenance dose of vodka and weed, caused him to step on the dead mule deer before he saw it. The carcass was the same brown as the grass and his boot sank in putrefied organs as easy as pie. His cell rang from somewhere on his person but he didn’t notice.
Disposing of roadkill was outside Mace’s purview so he wiped his footwear on a post and kept working his way up Dallas Divide. The joint trial had been held in Montrose District Court and Hodges fainted during the autopsy exhibits. The DA accused Mace and his client of being more focused on success than safety but Hodges’s lawyer was first-rate. Both men ducked the involuntary-manslaughter charge. Hodges reached a financial settlement with the dead man’s family and changed his hunting venue to Utah. Mace, being the person who explicitly authorized the misbegotten shot, was sentenced to three hundred hours of community service and open-ended pariah status.
When he got even with Dallas Park Cemetery, Mace studied the burial ground. Seeing no visitors, he dropped the garbage bag and crossed the road. He found the headstone of the guy killed by his blip of inattention in the newer section of graves and laid his hand on the white marble with a practiced motion. Robert R. Martinez had been a lance corporal in the Marine Corps, hence the scarlet flag with the eagle and anchor flapping in the wind. Next to that was a vase of wilted columbine. According to the words in stone, he lived almost twenty-seven years and the anniversary of his passing would fall on Saturday, a date now in everlasting lockstep with the dawn of rifle season.
Ridgway had a bunch of cliques for a puny town and the vets were easily the most empathetic. They went out of their way to exonerate Mace, saying Martinez did his time in the sandbox and came back broken and reckless and maybe that was true. But it didn’t absolve Mace of anything or begin to heal the runny gash in his soul. That wound had a mind of its own.
Mace never met the person boxed beneath his feet until he was too busy dying to chat. Saw him drinking with hermetic indifference at the True Grit Café but had no occasion to exchange pleasantries. Now he visited the same man’s grave with furtive regularity, communing with all that was mortgaged in that split second of shit judgment. Only dumb luck and bleary vigilance had kept him from bumping into Martinez’s parents since the broad-daylight nightmare of the funeral.
Mace drained the pint, hearing his dad hold forth on cut corners, magic meteorological thinking and lapses in situational awareness when rounds were chambered. All the slipshod urges capable of turning the most meticulous hunt into the disaster he n
* * *
Anna Martinez, mom of the dead bowhunter, was fifty-nine years old and assumed the man in the safety vest was a cemetery worker. When she recognized her son’s de facto killer, she yanked the door open and got back behind the wheel but couldn’t for the life of her get the key into the ignition. Her husband Gabriel was slumped in the front seat with a hollowed-out mien and paid the panic attack no mind. His hair was thick and white, his body brittle in repose. When her hands stopped shaking, Anna grabbed the fresh-cut columbine off the back seat and got out, eyes on the ground.
She switched out the flowers, tossed the broken bottle in a trash can and walked up to Mace with her jaw set and a tornado of livid grief roaring through her head. Then she got a good long look at the wrecked soul standing next to her son’s marker. And what came out of her mouth surprised even her. “Did you know Robert loved guns before he joined the Marines?”
“No, ma’am,” said Mace, staring at her nose to maintain his balance.
“Got his first rifle when he was ten. And after that, opening day was his Christmas Day. Didn’t matter if it was rabbits or deer or elk. Shot anything he could eat. I heard you were a lot like that.”
She waited for Mace to acknowledge that statement but he had his hands full just standing there so she focused on the jagged sweep of peaks behind his head and kept unpacking her point.
“Two tours over there changed everything. He came back hating guns. Then summer before last he got into bowhunting. Started disappearing for days at a time. Never took anyone with him. Never told us where he was going. He was so quiet and different, we were scared to death he’d kill himself up there. But we were wrong. Face paint and camo became his magic medicine. He loved being invisible. Loved seeing how close he could get to a big buck or bull. And when he talked about it, his eyes would light up and he’d be our sweet boy all over again.”
Mace cleared his throat. “He ever harvest any of those animals?”
“Never shot a living thing with that bow. I asked him why. Know what he said?”
She gave Mace a ten-second chance to answer like it was a pop quiz. He shook his head and her eyes drifted down to the grave. “Just because it wasn’t stupid easy like pulling a trigger didn’t make it right. Anyway, here’s the thing I want you to take with you. The main thing. Nobody on earth would have known Robert was there that day. Nobody. Not even you. Mason Winters.”
Then they heard the metallic creak. Anna turned and Mace looked past her. A frail hand was pushing the Subaru’s passenger door open. “Don’t do this to him,” she whispered. “Please.”
Mace ducked his head and cut toward the highway, not stopping until he was a mile down the shoulder next to a brush-strafed black Tundra with an empty gun rack and a toolbox in the bed. He got in, dug a tallboy from the console and drank it, staring through a windshield so scummy with bug juice and dope smoke the world looked sepia. Then he twirled the FM dial until “Far Away Eyes” sucked him into a twangy daydream and off he went sans seat belt. A bit later, the six-thousand-pound Tundra slipped the leash and mowed down a split-rail fence before coming to a debris-decorated halt in the ditch on the right. His face punctuated the impact by bouncing off the steering wheel.
* * *
Deputy Glenn Frazier was driving a blue Tahoe with a light bar down Dallas Divide dwelling on the buffalo cheeseburger at the Grit he intended to devour for lunch. A double with sweet-potato fries. Some darker things were messing with his head, like his paycheck being inhaled by a raft of bad decisions made in concert with his dick but that’s what made hunger so fun. It was easy to fix. Glenn was a red-haired, six-four bruiser with a passing resemblance to a supersize Russell Crowe. He played defensive tackle at Mesa University in Grand Junction until ACL tears sank the dream. He’d added some girth but could still wreak havoc in a hurry if pissed. He was thirty-five years old and rocked the tan slacks, chocolate shirt and gray Stetson of the Ouray County Sheriff’s Department.
When he saw the black Tundra churning dirt in the ditch full of busted railing, he pulled over ten yards back and studied the shit show. After determining the driver was more interested in digging a giant hole than getting clear of the ditch, he dismounted and rapped hard on the truck’s window. Mace gave the cop a hostile appraisal before rolling the glass down.
“Fuck you want?” he said curtly, left eye slit to nothing under a purple golf ball–size knob.
“How about you turn that engine off and exit the vehicle,” suggested Glenn.
“Watch your feet,” said Mace, gunning the V8 and rocking the gears between drive and reverse.
Glenn hopped on the running board, shot his arm into the cab and snagged the keys. Then he hauled Mace out the window, slipping punches aimed at his face and threw him on the ground. When the cuffs clicked, he tossed Mace in the caged back seat of the Tahoe, deftly jimmied the Tundra out of the ditch, parked it on the far side of the road and wiped the debris off the hood. Satisfied with his handiwork, he got in the Tahoe, made a U and headed west back up the Divide.
After cresting the summit and dropping into San Miguel County, Glenn checked the rearview and saw his prisoner lying face-down, arms bent behind his back. “Don’t be drooling on that seat.”
Mace sat up and looked around, accepting his situation like he’d been there before. “Shouldn’t you be out chasing homegrown terrorists with high-capacity magazines?”
“Bagged one yesterday,” said Glenn. “Came out of Mountain Annie’s smelling like sativa and shoutin’ about the Second Amendment in Texan.” Then he snapped his fingers. “Hey. Whatever happened to that sweet Sako 85 the fat cat from Odessa gave you? Had all that checkered walnut. Shot a .30-06 Springfield. Had your initials engraved on the receiver.”
Mace frowned at the floor and dredged up the answer. “Sold it at a swap meet down in Cortez.”
“You’re shitting me. A fine personalized firearm like that?”
“Didn’t need it.”
Glenn traced the rim of the Uncompahgre Plateau with a pained expression because that’s where he and Mace had hunted since they were runts. He’d stopped reminding Mace he wasn’t the guy who shot the stoner bowhunter lurking in camo on the first day of rifle season. Stopped trying to reason with him about any damn thing because it turned out self-loathing was tougher than Kevlar.
After turning right on 60X Road, they climbed the flank of the plateau then headed west through broad parks and forested moraines. On a gravel straightaway a dirt bike bore down on them at terrific speed. The machine was green and white. The guy on board was brawny and wore a black helmet with a mirrored visor. He flashed a peace sign as he screamed by. Mace twisted around and saw an American flag plastered across the rider’s back before he disappeared in a plume of dust.
“Future donor,” said Glenn, eyes on the side mirror.
* * *
Three miles later, Glenn turned onto Clanton Road and shortly thereafter drove through a gate onto the track that ran into Mace’s 160-acre parcel. It ended at a pretty two-story log home with a steep tin roof and covered porch. A squat barn rose beyond that, weathered gray and set against a meadow. Next to the barn was a woodshed and a fenced garden gone woolly with inattention.
Glenn parked in the yard, yanked Mace out, uncuffed him and blithely scratched the head of the sizable German shepherd that charged up, tail wagging. “Good boy, Vince. Good boy.”
Then he threw Mace the Tundra keys and punched a thick finger into his chest, rocking him backward like the wobbly drunk he was. “No more next time.”
Mace watched Glenn drive off, rubbing his wrists where the cuffs cut his skin, dug a roach from his pants and torched it. After that he went up the steps and into the house with the shepherd trotting at his heels, not bothering to close the front door. He was halfway across the living room when a Kodachrome snap of his parents drew him over to the mantel. Randy and Kay Winters were young and strong and standing on the porch of the same log home on a pure blue June day in 1983.
